Technews blog by Dave Maher

Microsoft says that Vista is selling at twice the rate that XP did in the wake of its release more than five years ago, with 20 million copies out there in the first month of availability. That’s Vista in all its incarnations–as an upgrade, as a standalone product, as an OS installed on new PCs. Impressive, no?

Well, maybe not. Bishop links to several other sources that point out that the personal-computer market has doubled since 2001. Which would mean that a Vista that sold twice as well as XP would just be keeping up.

And he points to a long post by Joe Wilcox at eWeek’s Microsoft Watch that raises, at least, additional questions about Microsoft’s bragging on Vista. I’m not an expert on operating-system sales cycles, so I’m not sure if Wilcox’s item is devastating or simply intriguing reading.

I don’t apologize for being curious about how many PC World readers are using Vista; we gotta keep tabs on that to know how much attention we should devote to the new OS. I don’t have hard numbers, but I can tell you this: In the month of March so far, about five percent of PCWorld.com visitors have come to the site via a Vista PC…and about 81 percent are still on XP.

Which is a meaningless figure unless you compare it to something. Thanks to the magic of Web analytics I can do just that: Back in 2001, during the comparable period after the release of Windows XP, eleven percent of PCWorld.com visitors were already running XP.